as spending in the house of her
brother, and friends and relations were coming from far and near to do
her honour. It is inconceivable that Mr. Nicholas B. should not have
been of the number. The little child a few months old he had taken up in
his arms on the day of his home-coming after years of war and exile was
confessing her faith in national salvation by suffering exile in her
turn. I do not know whether he was present on the very day of our
departure. I have already admitted that for me he is more especially
the man who in his youth had eaten roast dog in the depths of a
gloomy forest of snow-loaded pines. My memory cannot place him in any
remembered scene. A hooked nose, some sleek white hair, an unrelated
evanescent impression of a meagre, slight, rigid figure militarily
buttoned up to the throat, is all that now exists on earth of Mr.
Nicholas B.; only this vague shadow pursued by the memory of his
grand-nephew, the last surviving human being, I suppose, of all those he
had seen in the course of his taciturn life.

But I remember well the day of our departure back to exile. The
elongated, bizarre, shabby travelling-carriage with four post-horses,
standing before the long front of the house with its eight columns,
four on each side of the broad flight of stairs. On the steps, groups
of servants, a few relations, one or two friends from the nearest
neighbourhood, a perfect silence, on all the faces an air of sober
concentration; my grandmother all in black gazing stoically, my uncle
giving his arm to my mother down to the carriage in which I had been
placed already; at the top of the flight my little cousin in a short
skirt of a tartan pattern with a deal of red in it, and like a
small princess attended by the women of her own household: the head
gourvernante, our dear, corpulent Francesca (who had been for thirty
years in the service of the B. family), the former nurse, now outdoor
attendant, a handsome peasant face wearing a compassionate expression,
and the good, ugly Mlle. Durand, the governess, with her black eyebrows
meeting over a short thick nose and a complexion like pale brown paper.
Of all the eyes turned towards the carriage, her good-natured eyes only
were dropping tears, and it was her sobbing voice alone that broke the
silence with an appeal to me: "N'oublie pas ton francais, mon cheri." In
three months, simply by playing with us, she had taught me not only
to speak French but to read it as well.